Female mysticism as a phenomenon tends to wax and wane, although for most historical periods at least a few women mystics left their mark. However,certain circumstances--social, political, and/or religious--seem more conducive to female mysticism. During the High Middle Ages, and again during the late twentieth century, many women succeeded in finding authoritative voice through writing of their mystical experiences and visions. This has occurred in certain other periods as well, but the parallels between the oppression of European women within the institutional church in the High Middle Ages and the oppression which confronted--and still confronts--Western women of the late twentieth century are numerous enough that many feminist writers, scholars and theologians not only mention both together but often cite evidence of one to illustrate the other (see Starhawk, 1989, Spretnak,1982, Daly, 1978, Walker, 1985, Dworkin, 1974, Giles, 1982, Jantzen, 1995, Ruether, 1974, 1975.)
It is significant that from a historical perspective, movements in which large numbers of women make use of mystical experiences as a way to be heard by the larger community are accompanied by periods of strong male backlash against women, usually justified on religious grounds. The "chicken or egg" question which arises in connection with the simultaneous appearance of these two phenomena deserves further analysis, which is beyond the limited scope of this work. It should be noted that a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical contexts in which female mysticism flourishes has not yet been attempted.
A brief discussion of what constitutes a "mystical experience" seems an appropriate preface. A mystical experience can be identified, according to William James, by the presence of four elements: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity (James, 299-300*). For the purpose of this analysis two other elements can be included: what twentieth-century psychology would call an altered state of consciousness, and a subsequent certainty that the visionary has connected with something larger than the self--not necessarily something outside of or separate from the self, but something greater and more all-encompassing than the single individual ego-self. Starhawk, a well-known contemporary witch, refers to "altered states of awareness, in which insights that go beyond words are revealed"; she cites these altered states as one of the goals of Wiccan ritual (Starhawk 1989: 7). Barbara Walker, another post-Christian witch who has been at the forefront of the feminist spirituality movement for several years, provides an updated but remarkably Jamesian explanation of what constitutes a "true vision": A true vision appears when one least expects it . . . in three dimensions and in full color . . . seemingly as solid and real as anything else in the environment. . . . [The vision] is there to be seen for only a short while, and then it disappears. . . . A unique emotional response accompanies the true vision. One believes at the time that it is realer than real, a revelation of some deep inner meaning applicable to all of life, or the future, or the cosmos, or all of them together. It seems a sort of key, a pipeline to eternity, an overwhelming truth--even though one can never plainly state of what this truth consists. One only feels sure of its transcendant significance (Walker 1987, 76-77).
Walker's definition matches that of James in that it includes ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity, although James is writing of traditional (i.e., Christian) visions, while Walker is describing the characteristics of visions in general and of Wiccan visions in particular. Based on these criteria, a comparison of the writings of medieval women mystics with those of twentieth-century pagan visionaries reveals that they have in common at least those characteristics by which a mystical experience might be identified.
The examples which follow will serve to illustrate these and other common elements. Barbara Walker offers the following recollection of one of her own mystical experiences, one which occurred when she was thirteen:

I faced a long, open nave between two lines of trees, a narrow space slashed by golden shafts of late sunlight reaching toward one enormous tree that towered over the others. As I refocused my eyes for distance and looked toward this tree through a corridor of lights and shadows, the tree suddenly became a woman. It wasn't just a tree that resembled a woman; it was the woman herself. She was a hefty, hippy, bosomy naked green woman with three heads and huge powerful legs planted in the earth. . . . Her three faces were . . . true faces, not just the looks-like sort of faces that one always sees in tree branches. The face to my left was that of a young girl. The face in the center was that of a mature woman. The face to my right was that of an old woman. . . . Out of the dark triangle of the giant woman's crotch, between her massive thighs, poured an endless stream of living things. All species of plants and animals were mingled in a mass flowing like the waters of a river . . . The three faces high above took no notice of this perpetual birthing. The enormous body seemed to do it automatically. . . . I have never forgotten a single detail of that afternoon's experience. . . . It was only after many years that I began to realize that this had been a true vision, that is, an extrusion of genuine archetypal material from the deep places in either my individual unconscious or the collective unconcsious of my race (Walker 1987: 78-80.)

Over eight centuries ago, Hildegard of Bingen described a series of mystical visions in her work Scivias. The following is her description of one of them:

After this I saw the image of a woman as large as a great city, with a wonderful crown on her head and arms from which a splendor hung like sleeves, shining from Heaven to earth. Her womb was pierced like a net with many openings, with a huge multitude of people running in and out. . . . I could not make out her attire, except that she was arrayed in great splendor and gleamed with lucid serenity, and on her breast shown a red glow like the dawn; and I heard a sound of all kinds of music singing about her, "Like the dawn, greatly sparkling." And that image spread out its splendor like a garment, saying, "I must conceive and give birth!" (Hildegard, 1990: 169).

There are some differences between these two experiences; perhaps the most readily apparent is the radically different contexts in which they occurred. Barbara Walker experienced her vision while walking alone in the woods, as a youngster growing up in the middle of the twentieth century. She wrote of it in adulthood, and identified it with her practice of witchcraft. Hildegard's vision came to her within the confinement of a twelfth-century Benedictine convent. She was a devout Roman Catholic, and wrote of this and other visions because she believed she had been commanded by God to do so. However, these two visions share the elements listed by James and by Walker herself: they provided knowledge which the visionaries had not previously had; they occurred in what could be described as an altered state of consciousness; they occurred without conscious intent; and they were transient experiences.
But the most remarkable similarity between the two visions is their content. The archetypal image of a huge woman continually giving birth is a startling one to find in the work of a medieval Benedictine nun, but it is there nonetheless. Walker's assertion that her vision was an "extrusion of genuine archetypal material" may be more plausible than it first appears.
Alongside the image of the enormous birthing woman, other imagery is manifested in both medieval and contemporary visions. The image of the world as a wheel appears frequently in both sacred and secular medieval artwork, as well as in the visionary literature of contemporary witches. Hildegard's visions and illuminations repeat this image several times and in different contexts. In the Book of Divine Works, she wrote: "The firmament has a revolving orbit in imitation of the power of God which has neither beginning nor end--just as no one can see where the encircling wheel begins or ends" (Hildegard, 1996: 94-95, see also 1990: 137.) The illumination which accompanies this writing is titled "The Wheel of Life," and it is indeed a picture of a wheel. Hildegard also compared the cosmos to a potter's wheel: "The sun's heat and the moisture of the waters cultivate the whole earth, make it fruitful, and complete it, just as a potter completes his vessels by turning his wheel" (1985: 48).
The imagery of the Wheel of Life appears in contemporary visions as well. Zsuzsanna Budapest devotes an entire chapter to "The Sacred Wheel" in The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries (114-137). The cyclic nature of life, the Life-Death-Life cycle, is illustrated by the wheel, as Starhawk explains in her account of her own vision of the Wheel of the Year:

In love, the Horned God, changing form and changing face, ever seeks the Goddess. In this world, the search and the seeking appear in the Wheel of the Year. She is the Great Mother who gives birth to Him as the Divine Child Sun at the Winter Solstice. In spring, He is sower and seed who grows with the growing light, green as the new shoots. She is the Initiatrix who teaches Him the mysteries. . . In summer, when light is longest, they meet in union, and the strength of their passion sustains the world. But the God's face darkens as the sun grows weaker, until at last . . . He too sacrifices himself . . . that all may be nourished. She is the reaper, the grave of earth to which all must return. Throughout the long nights and darkening days He sleeps in her womb . . . His dark tomb becomes the womb of rebirth, for at Midwinter She again gives birth to Him. The cycle ends and begins again, and the Wheel of the Year turns, on and on (Starhawk, 1989: 43).

Interestingly, both Hildegard and Starhawk, more than eight centuries apart, made reference to "the wheel of the cosmos" (Starhawk, ibid., Hildegard 1985: 41, 105). Hildegard's words are eerily reminiscent of Starhawk's: "Out of the original source of the true Love in whose knowledge the cosmic wheel rests, there shines forth an exceedingly precise order over all things. And this order which preserves and nourishes everything comes to light in a way that is ever new. . . " (Hildegard 1985: 41).
Another area of remarkable similarity in visions of these two periods is that of the imaging of deity as female. Again Hildegard's writings are revelatory. She wrote of many god-like feminine characters in the Scivias, but the three that appear with the most frequency are Caritas, Ecclesia, and Sapientia.
Caritas, divine love, is a girl dressed in sparkling white who holds in her hands the sun and the moon: "And all creation called this girl domina" (Dronke, 170). Ecclesia, the continually birthing mother in Hildegard's vision, represents the New Eve, the womb, the mother of the church (Newman, 208-210). Hildegard had this to say of her vision of Ecclesia: "Wherefore now you see the image of a woman as large as a great city; this designates the Bride of My Son, who always bears her children by regeneration in the Spirit and in water" (Hildegard 1990: 170, italics are those of the translator). Sapientia is Holy Wisdom, the consort of God, his "loving mistress," a position she shares with Caritas and with Ecclesia; it can thus be inferred that these three female images are in fact different aspects of the same woman (Hildegard 1990: 31, Newman, 49-50, Dronke, 146).
Many medieval women envisioned God as female, or as having many feminine traits. Julian of Norwich developed an entire theology around the idea of God as mother, and Marguerite of Porete identified God as characterized by Love as a beautiful woman (Bynum 111, Nuth, 65, Porete, 29 and throughout the text; see also Julian of Norwich). Hadewijch of Antwerp wrote poetry about God as Lady Love in the courtly love tradition of her time: "Love is noble maiden and queen . . . it appears she is Love and lady, that she is mother of the virtues: She is fertile, and she alone bears the fidelity from which all you who love are endowed with power" (Jantzen 1995: 292, Dreyer 49-54).
However, Hildegard's visions of Caritas, Ecclesia, and Sapientia are especially intriguing, exhibiting as they do an unmistakable resemblance to twentieth-century manifestations and visions of the goddess in her triple aspect of maiden or virgin, mother, and crone. Barbara Walker's giant birthing woman had three faces: young, mature, and elderly. The triple aspect of the goddess is a central theme in feminist spirituality, and the three aspects are simply different faces of the same female deity, in much the same way that Hildegard's three female characters are actually one and the same. Starhawk writes at length of the pagan triple goddess:

The Goddess is first of all earth, the dark nurturing mother who brings forth all life. She is the power of fertility and generation, and also the receptive tomb, the power of death. All proceeds from Her; all returns to Her. . . . The Earth Goddess is also air and sky, the celestial Queen of Heaven, the Star Goddess, ruler of things felt but not seen. . . She is the cosmic lover, the morning and evening star . . . The celestial Goddess is seen as the moon, who is linked to women's monthly cycles of bleeding and fertility. . . . The Moon Goddess has three aspects: As She waxes, She is the Maiden; full, She is the Mother; as She wanes, She is the Crone. (Starhawk, 1989:92).

Zsuzsanna Budapest also discusses the three-in-one goddess nature (278-285), as do nearly all women who write on the subject of feminist spirituality. It is as unlikely to find a book on contemporary witchcraft that does not mention the triple goddess as it is to find a book on Christianity that does not mention the trinitarian nature of the Christian god. This female triple imagery is actually much older than Christianity, dating back at least as far as the Eleusinian mystery cult in ancient Greek civilization which revered Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate (among others); Barbara Walker mentions that the cult of Demeter was established at Mycenae as early as the thirteenth century B.C.E. (Walker, 1983: 219). The triple goddess also appears in the mythology of many other ancient cultures, such as the Celtic Morrigan (Ana, Babd, and Macha), the Norns of Viking lore, and the Diana Triformis of the druids (Walker, 1983: 1018). Nevertheless it is startling to encounter this imagery in the visions of medieval women, writing as they were from firmly entrenched positions within the male-dominated Christian tradition.
A fascinating by-product of envisioning God as female was the enhanced self-image apparently enjoyed by medieval women as a result of their visions. Women like Gertrude the Great, Hadewijch of Antwerp, and Mechtild of Magdeburg, for instance, "do not disparage women and never apologize for their gender" (Jantzen, 173, 176), and even Julian and Hildegard, who frequently described themselves in disparaging terms, seemed to be following a prescribed formula for women's writing that did not accurately reflect their own views (Jantzen, ibid.). Jennifer Heimmel notes the "subtle and drastic changes" in Julian's work from the short to the long text of Revelations, and cites those changes as evidence of Julian's "growing awareness and assertion of feminine worth" (Heimmel, 77); Such changes were directly related to her God-as-mother theology, developed over a period of several years. Hildegard not only described aspects of God in female terms, but suggested that misogyny originated with Satan in the garden, and was a product of his envy of Eve's potential motherhood; Eve was thus "more sinned against than sinning, not so much tempted as victimized outright" (Newman, 112-116). As Newman points out, this was a radical departure from the Augustinian model of Eve's--and by identification, all women's--guilt. If Eve's capacity for motherhood could be described as enviable, the childbearing capacities (i.e., the bodies) of all women were thereby elevated.
Although several feminist scholars, Newman among them, cite this identification of women with motherhood (and the accompanying glorification of that state) as limiting and problematic from a feminist perspective, it should be noted that Hildegard, Julian, and many other medieval mystics were themselves examples of different choices that were available to women, choices that did not involve marriage and motherhood. Whatever their motives and/or inclinations may have been, three things are apparent: 1), they did not see women's bodies as inherently evil, partly because women were capable of giving birth, 2), they did not see motherhood as the be-all and end-all of women's existence, as evidenced by their own lives, and 3), envisioning God as female served to enhance their own confidence and self-appreciation as women (mothers or not). Jantzen explains the significance of the affirmation of femaleness implicit in feminine depictions of God: "If God can be thought of as Mother and in female terms, then mothering, and femaleness, can be thought of as godlike. The imago dei need not be seen to reside wholly in the mind, but the gendered body, too, can be integrated into godliness" (303).
The integration of the gendered body into godliness is a concept inextricably connected with medieval women's visions of God as female. One of the principal differences between visions of medieval women mystics and those of men was the women's reclamation of embodiment, specifically female embodiment, as an aspect of holiness. Even women who had internalized negative cultural attitudes about the body found cause to celebrate female biology through their visions. The female aspect of God envisioned by Julian, Hildegard, Mechtild, Marguerite, and many others was a woman with a woman's body, complete with breasts, a womb, and the ability to conceive and give birth. This imagery translated into more positive assessments of the biological functions of human women. For example, Hildegard was told by a divine voice that the ancient taboos against menstruating women were not necessary, and that menstruating women deserved special care: "but therefore the woman should be cherished in this time with a great and healing tenderness. Let her contain herself in hidden knowledge; she should not, however, restrain herself from going into My temple, but faith allows her to enter" (Hildegard 1990: 83). Furthermore, Hildegard shifted the taboos against menstrual blood to semen, and to the blood issuing from the wounds of men injured in battle, in a reversal that would have delighted many twentieth-century feminists (ibid., see also Jantzen, 231 and Newman, 134-135).
The importance for women of feminine images of deity cannot be overstated. It has been commented upon at great length by twentieth-century feminists. Carol Christ wrote "Why Women Need the Goddess" nearly twenty years ago (Christ, 273), and the theme of women needing a female model of God appears in every book on feminist spirituality published since that time. Indeed, it is almost the anthem of the feminist spirituality movement; as Christ noted, "The affirmation of female power contained in the Goddess symbol has both psychological and political consequences" (ibid., 278). These consequences were as significant for women in the twelfth century as they are for contemporary women. It is interesting that medieval women first had visions of the feminine aspects of God, and then later, as a result of their visions, were able to view themselves and other women more positively, while many twentieth-century women actively seek female images of deity to represent their own growing sense of power and to counter negative images of women, both in religion and in the dominant culture. Given the misogyny of the church during the High Middle Ages, the question of intentionality in mystical visions raised by Steven Katz takes on a new significance in this context (Katz, 33). If, as Katz suggests, the contents of a mystical vision are defined in advance in the mind of the visionary, what can then be inferred about a medieval woman's vision of a giant woman continually birthing the world?
A related area in which the visions of contemporary witches parallel those of their Christian foremothers is the idea of the self as deity. This was a heretical notion during the High Middle Ages; that mystics expressed it at all suggests that the idea was a very powerful one, since the penalty for heresy was unpleasant and usually fatal. Such self-deification was nevertheless an occasional by-product of mystical experience for medieval Christian women, and it appears in the writings of the ultra-orthodox almost as often as in the writings of women whose positions were more precarious. "'My Me is God,' wrote Catherine of Genoa; Hadewijch of Brabant wished 'To be God with God'; Angela of Foligno [known as "The Blessed Angela"] wrote that 'The Word was made flesh to make me God.'" (Wiethaus, 41). Marguerite of Porete, one of the more audacious of the medieval women mystics, wrote these words in A Mirror for Simple Souls:

The soul no longer sees her own nothingness from the depths of humility, nor the greatness of God through his great goodness. Instead, God sees himself in her through his own power. . . What is, is God . . . Pure and enlightened, it is no longer her seeing God and herself, but God seeing himself in her, through her and outside her (Porete, 132-133)

Marguerite continued, "Now let me tell you what I saw while I was in the life of the spirit: I saw God in me and myself in him" (140). If her meaning is ambiguous in those words, it is unmistakable in these: "I am God, for Love is God and God is Love, and this soul is God by condition of Love, so that this precious friend of mine is taught and led by Me, without herself, for she is transformed into Me" (Brunn, 152). Marguerite paid dearly for her daring; she was tried as a heretic and burned at the stake in 1310. She was associated erroneously with the Heresy of the Free Spirit, and ironically it was her very freedom that doomed her. Other women writing in the same vein escaped the Inquisitors because they were safely confined within convent walls, or like Catherine, affiliated with a tertiary order. Hadewijch was a Beguine, but when she drew the attention of the Inquisitors she entered a convent. Marguerite refused to compromise or to give up her freedom, or to recant any of the statements in the Mirror, and her refusal cost her her life.
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